


Get Busy Living or Get Busy Dying

by pressdbtwnpages



Category: Bandom, Jonas Brothers
Genre: AU, Crossover, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-24
Updated: 2010-05-24
Packaged: 2017-10-17 18:59:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/180165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pressdbtwnpages/pseuds/pressdbtwnpages
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU where Nick discovers the scene and ends up in a band with his brothers signed to Decaydance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Get Busy Living or Get Busy Dying

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this](http://blackwayfarers.livejournal.com/43759.html?thread=1938159) prompt at the Being Attractive and Doing Things ficathon.

It's Nick who discovers the scene first, 13 and aimless, searching for something to fill the void that his Diabetes-ruined Broadway career created.

He hears about the venue from a kid in his Spanish class. Chris is 15, not a bad kid, but he's not all that bright and has a tendency to follow other people into trouble. Chris is a lead singer, but his band isn't popular enough to sell as many tickets as you have to to get a slot at Rock Rodeo. Still, he talks about it incessantly and Nick is curious enough, lonely enough, to ask Chris for more information.

It doesn't take a lot of convincing to get Joe to come along the next Friday night.

Joe buys tickets in the parking lot from a guy wearing frighteningly detailed skull makeup. The skull is perfectly nice, but Joe steps closer to Nick anyway.

Rock Rodeo is ostensibly an Italian restaurant, a rundown maze of a facility with a large room at the back that contains a stage and a bar.

The music is nothing like what Nick expected, even knowing Chris. It's mostly loud screaming and semi-rhythmic drums with the occasional squealing electric guitar. The crowd skips around in a circle, helping each other up when someone falls. One band has a female singer who gets up with her blown out voice and growls about how women are beautiful without makeup. Or at least Nick thinks that's what she's saying.

It's weird, and Nick's pretty sure it isn't what he's looking for, but Joe presses up behind him, shouting in his ear about how cool it is, and Nick knows he'll suggest that he and Joe come back next week.

One of the elders at church has a son in a band that plays Rock Rodeo fairly regularly. This, and Kevin joining them from time to time, is what allows Nick and Joe to keep going totally unsupervised. Drew is 18 and he slips them beers and cigarettes occasionally. Makes them mix CDs of punk music they should know. Some of it is actually music Nick listens to more than once. He likes the Toy Dolls and The Warriors.

Rock Rodeo was never exactly booking class acts, but the quality of the bands starts dwindling and six months after Nick and Joe start going, Rock Rodeo stops putting on open mic nights and goes back to being just a pretty awful Italian restaurant.

Joe and Nick float aimlessly for a few weeks, both of them missing the anonymity and solidarity of the shows. Then Drew approaches them one Sunday morning during social hour and tells them about a friend of a friend's show in the city the next weekend.

Drew is driving and tickets are cheap so their parents give them permission.

It's supposed to be a one-time thing, but by the time their parents put a stop to their weekend trips to the city, Drew has showed them all he knows about the decrepit clubs that don't card and let real bands play.

For Christmas, Nick gets a drum set, Kevin gets a guitar, and Joe gets a bass. Their parents have clearly figured out that the concerts in the city aren't exactly adult contemporary bands. The instruments are a bribe, a distraction, and it works well, even with Kevin away at college in the city. They practice seperately and Kevin comes home on the weekends. Nick is pretty sure Kevin doesn't have any friends at school.

Joe decides he wants to be Pete Wentz and gets a ridiculous haircut and starts wearing eye makeup. He tries to be melancholy, but all the eyeliner in the world couldn't hide Joe's joie de vivre.

Mandy, Joe's sweet girlfriend, dumps him for a football player. She tells him it's because he's never around, because he'd rather jam with his brothers than spend time with her. Joe throws a glass bottle of root beer at the wall and needs stitches. Nick writes a scathing song about blood and boys who are nuisances and being right and moving on.

They play it loud and angry.

Nick and Joe get good at sneaking out. It's easy with two of them, and Kevin in the city complicit. They get practiced at hiding skinny jeans under their sweats, and Joe is surprisingly adept at applying eyeliner on a moving train.

They make friends with bands, helping them with their kits and selling merch for them.

Two years pass like that, small smokey clubs, cheap beer, dim lights and tight jeans, dancing with whoever will have them though it's best together.

And then Joe goes to college. It isn't something he really wanted, college is just something you do, and he and Nick hoped Joe could stay at home and go to a junior college. But instead Joe ends up in the city too, while Nick is stuck in the suburbs.

Nick is 15 and alone and bored and the last time he felt like this he'd discovered Rock Rodeo.

Joe calls excitedly early early one Saturday morning. He tells Nick that one of the clubs they frequent is holding an open mic night and that he and Kevin signed them up.

Things go quickly from there. Someone who knows someone is at the open mic night. They book a couple of gigs, mostly on the strength of being brothers like the Ways from My Chemical Romance. Kevin gets a college acquaintance to help them make a CD and before they know what's happened, Pete Wentz himself is striding up their driveway during Christmas break and telling them he wants to sign them.

They get a van and instructions to "follow those guys" and Son of Jonas is on tour, opening for Panic at the Disco.

Recording in L.A. Nick meets Miley Cyrus. Sleeps with her. Falls in love. Falls in love with one of Miley's co-stars. Nick and Miley's sextape somehow winds up on the internet. He gets dubbed Pete Wentz' protege. Ryan Ross, Panic's main songwriter and Pete's real protege, stops talking to him. Their mom stops calling him. His brothers hug him tight. Joe offers casually to come out of the closet to take the heat off Nick.

It's not like Nick's never seen his brother pressed up against boys in dark corners, but somehow he's never really associated that with being gay. Nick tells Joe to do whatever he wants as far as coming out, but Nick can handle the fall out from the sextape.

Nick starts paying more attention to his brothers lives. Things fizzle out with Selena before they ever really start. Nick can't stop thinking about Joe being gay. Somewhere in the last year of being rockstars, Kevin has found a nice girl to be his one and only. Photographs of Joe kissing Pete, Gabe Sapporta, Brendon Urie surface, but it's no big deal, it's just Decaydance. Just how things are on their label. It bothers Nick anyway. With Brendon, it wasn't just kissing, Joe's in love. Nick can't see any possible way for this to end well.

Brendon's band sequesters itself for the better part of a year and releases an album of love songs to girls and to each other. Brendon and his drummer Spencer are in love. Joe is devastated.

Nick writes a nasty song about video boys and closing goddamn doors and albums needing a breakup song. Joe refuses to sing it, so Nick plays it live at a festival. The crowd loves it and it winds up on Son of Jonas' next album sandwiched between songs about starry-eyed lovers and destiny.

Months later Nick is trying to work things out with Miley, Kevin is proposing to Danielle, and Joe is dating a movie star on the low-low-low down. Things are going well. Joe has started nodding along when Kevin daydreams about a hiatus and saying things about Vermont. Nick drives his car into a tree.

It was an accident.

It was.

Nick's injuries solve the hiatus debate, and all of the sudden Nick's mom is speaking to him again. Joe tables the boyfriend to take care of Nick, and suddenly the movie star is out and proud and dating another actor with a hot franchise.

Kevin and Joe help Nick write a sad, sweet song about things looking beautiful in black and white and rain in bedrooms and blood being thicker. Even though they've been off the radar for awhile, the single goes straight to number one.

Their return tour is a co-headlining gig with their label-mates, a bunch of kids who look like High School Musical extras and have probably never set foot in a real club, never been shoved around a mosh pit. They have a catchy hit song and are mostly drama free, though their singer keeps asking Nick for Miley Cyrus' number.

Nick and Joe spend a lot of time together while Kevin puts the finishing touches on his wedding plans. When the tour passes through L.A. Pete texts them, tells them about a tiny seedy venue, that they should go, revisit their roots.

They tug on their tightest jeans and Joe borrows an eyeliner pencil from the 16 year old girl who fronts their opening band. He lines Nick's eyes with ease, as if it hasn't been three years and a record deal since they last snuck into a club.

The club assails them with the familiar scents of old sweat and smoke, stale beer and adrenaline. The band isn't that good, but the beat vibrates through their bones, is fast enough to give Nick and Joe an excuse to hold each other close and dance. Underneath the blue lights Nick tilts his head up and kisses his older brother hard. He hasn't worried about whether or not Joe would kiss back since he was 15, but he's never stopped wanting. But Joe does kiss back, holds Nick tight as his knees go weak.

Nick wants to write a song. One about tonight and tomorrow and all the glittery bright days that stretch out endlessly before them.


End file.
